The Doggy Diaries... gone to the dogs!

Going, going ... gone

They're gone. All gone. Every single post, email, piece of data ... if I wrote it, received it, uploaded it or modified it since 10/12/06, it's gone and will never return.

Apparently, my web hosting company had problems both with my account and the server my account is hosted on. Something happened, and when they had to restore my account, they found that they do not have any reliable backup data for my account for the past 2.5 weeks.

So here we are. I've lost all the blog posts, pictures, everything that I've written to this blog since the earlier part of October. And because I didn't (and still don't) know how to do backups to an offsite location, I don't have any data to hand over to my web host for them to fix my account.

I'm pretty much at a loss for words. TCH has been a great host with world-class equipment. It boggles me how something like this could happen. I'm not going to get on their case because, as we all know, s**t happens. But I'm incredibly bummed because of all the email I am now missing and all the time I spent writing blog posts was essentially wasted. Not only that, but all the photos I took of the trees in our neighborhood are gone. So my week by week comparison is hosed.

All I can say is "It's a good thing I wasn't trying to run a commercial website." Had this happened to a business website, it would be potentially disastrous.

In order to enable me to recover from something like this in the future, I'd like to put out a request to anyone and everyone who is tech-savvy. Will you please teach me how to run offsite backups of my data? Please, please, pretty please?

The only type of backup I've got right now is a cron-daemon backup that saves the files to my own webspace outside the public_html directory. I don't really understand how the cron-daemon works. Someone once helped me set it up, and I've never touched it since.

I also never learned how to back up to an offsite location because I figured TCH had storage and backup redundancy. This kind of redundancy is a "must have" where I work. We're heartily discouraged from keeping only one copy of a digital file if we think it's important. When we save something to our personal hard drives, we are encouraged to do a simultaneous save to our server space. Then, to my knowledge, the server space is backed up redundantly, as well, so we're never out data if one image is destroyed. That's part of the reason why we've got more than a petabyte of storage here. (Most of our storage goes to experimental data being collected, but that's another issue entirely!)

Anyway, if any of you can help me set up an offsite backup of my website, I would very, very much appreciate it. I don't want to lose two weeks of data like this again. Thanks in advance!

Thursday's Thirteen No. 3

Thirteen Places I've Visited

1. Morro Bay / San Luis Obispo, California
2. Custer, Wisconsin
3. Yosemite National Park, California
4. Fishkill, New York
5. Portland, Oregon
6. Pinnacles National Monument, California
7. Las Vegas, Nevada
8. Phoenix, Arizona
9. Sequoia National Forest, California
10. Kalispell, Montana
11. Reno, Nevada
12. Yellowstone National Park / Old Faithful Geyser, Wyoming
13. The happiest place on earth ... Disneyland!

Pumpkins, Pumpkins and More Pumpkins!

This year, I decided I wanted to grow my own pumpkins. I wasn't sure how they'd turn out because (1) I planted them late in the season and (2) the only spot in our yard suitable for a garden gets about three to four hours of direct sunlight, at most, in the peak days of summer. Nevertheless, we came away with quite a bit of booty. We actually got several pumpkins from our little 10x6 patch of dirt.

In metropolitan California, real, honest-to-goodness pumpkin patches are practically non-existant. Since moving to this rather depressing concrete jungle almost five years ago, I've watched three different "pumpkin patches" fold. They weren't even real pumpkin patches where you get to pick your pumpkin from the vine. The pumpkins were pre-picked and laid helter-skelter on empty parking lots with a bit of straw and some orange lights strewn about. Not exactly a "pick-your-own" kind of feeling, but certainly better than picking one up in your local grocer's produce section, nonetheless. As of 2006, I know of only one remaining pumpkin patch in the South Bay/South Peninsula area. (No, I can't say for sure that there are no other patches, just none that I've seen in my drives around the area.) This patch also happens to be located in the most shee-shee, froo-froo area of the Peninsula -- the area around Stanford University. I stopped by one year and was shocked at the prices they were charging for a pumpkin. Oh well, I guess price doesn't matter for the folks who can afford to live in the surrounding neighborhood.

Anyway, back to my story. Having truly adored pumpkin patches, hayrides and all the other festivities of harvest season as a child growing up in a rural, agricultural area, I wanted to share a similar experience with my coworker's daughter. Sarah has never known a life outside the concrete jungle, and I thought it would be a treat for her. Yesterday afternoon, Deborah brought Sarah over to pick pumpkins.

No, I didn't have any of the niceties of a real pumpkin patch. But the pumpkins were still on their vines, and Sarah got to go around picking this one and that one. I think she had a good time. Next year, (if we're still here), I'll plant pumpkins again but will do so earlier in the season. Then, when they're ready to harvest, I'll decorate the area as best I can with what I've got to work with. Hopefully, it will be more festive than this year.

Autumn Color, Part Deux

Yesterday, I posted photos of a few trees in our neighborhood that are just starting to get dandied up in preparation for the harvest season. Today, I'd like to share a few shots of autumn color around our front porch. Enjoy!

(Click on the small photos for a larger version.)

Our festive front porch, complete with the ever-present American flag

And now for the close ups ...

These cute little mums just seem to smile and shout "Welcome to autumn!"

The other side of the porch is a hodge-podge of summer coleus (foreground), crimson winter cyclamen (not yet in bloom), orange and crimson mums, a pumpkin grown in our own backyard (!), the last of my blue and white summer annuals and a potted palm tree that seems to prefer our front porch to our living room.

The other side of our porch

A close-up of those gorgeous crimson mums ...

Autumn Color

I was motivated by the Everyday Housewife to snap a few photos this weekend of the newly emerging fall color around our neighborhood.

Here are some shots of two Liquid Amber trees -- ours and our backyard neighbor's. As you can see, they're just starting to get a hint of color. If I can remember, I'll be taking photos of them each weekend, and we can all watch the progression of color together!

I've got more photos, but not enough time to post them all right now. Hopefully, I'll get around to posting them tomorrow.

(Click on the small photos for a larger version.)

This is our tree ...

... and here is our neighbor's tree!

The Tortoise and the Hippo

This is almost two years old, but it's still as cute as can be!

NAIROBI, Jan 6, 2005: A baby-hippopotamus that survived the tsunami waves on the Kenyan coast has formed a strong bond with a giant male century-old tortoise, in an animal facility in the port city of Mombasa.

The hippopotamus, nicknamed Owen and weighing about 300 kilograms, was swept down Sabaki River into the Indian Ocean, then forced back to shore when tsunami waves struck the Kenyan coast on Dec 26, before wildlife rangers rescued him.

"It is incredible. A-less-than-a-year-old hippo has adopted a male tortoise, about a century old, and the tortoise seems to be very happy with being a 'mother'," ecologist Paula Kahumbu said.

"After it was swept and lost its mother, the hippo was traumatized. It had to look for something to be a surrogate mother. Fortunately, it landed on the tortoise and established a strong bond. They swim, eat and sleep together," the ecologist added.

"The hippo follows the tortoise exactly the way it follows its mother. If somebody approaches the tortoise, the hippo becomes aggressive, as if protecting its biological mother," Kahumbu added.

"The hippo is a young baby, he was left at a very tender age and by nature, hippos are social animals that like to stay with their mothers for four years," he explained. In 2002, a barren Kenyan lioness made several attempts to play mother to baby antelopes, one of which ended with a rival lion making a meal out of the calf.

Snopes.com reports that conservation workers were planning introduce Owen to Cleo, a 13-year-old female hippo, sometime in 2006. Cleo has gone without the companionship of her own species for over ten years.

Here are some photos of the then-infant hippo as he followed his new "mother" about in their enclosure in Haller Park, a wildlife sanctuary in the coastal city of Mombasa, Kenya.